With PowerGREP you can work with zip files and other archives as if they were regular file folders. Files inside archives are decompressed on-the-fly. Now you can save hard disk space or place more files on a CD or DVD by compressing them, and still search through them as usual.

When collecting data or converting many files, PowerGREP can save the results into one or more new zip archives, even if the original files were not compressed. This is particularly useful if you plan to email the results. Now you need to attach only one zip file.

If you like to keep backup files around, save disk space by telling PowerGREP to compress backups into zip archives. Use the "numbered archive" backup type to create a new archive for each action's backup files. While PowerGREP's Undo History handles zipped or regular backup files just the same, a single zip file is handier if you want to archive backups outside of PowerGREP.

Skipping ZIP Files and Other Archives

Of course, sometimes you don't want to search through .zip files. Simply turn off "search through archives" in the File Selector menu to tell PowerGREP to skip zip files.

Archive Formats PowerGREP Can Read and Write

All of PowerGREP's features are available for these file formats:

ZIP archives: ZIP format used by PKZip, WinZIP, and a host of other compression utilities. This is the most popular archive format.

7-zip archives: 7z format used by 7-zip. This format yields the smallest files of all the archive formats that PowerGREP can create.

TAR uncompressed: Uncompressed tarball (.tar file).

TAR GZip: Tarball compressed into a GZip file (.tar.gz or .tgz file).

TAR BZip2: Tarball compressed into a BZip2 file (.tar.bz2 file).

GZip: Single file compressed with GZip

BZip2: Single file compressed with BZip2

PowerGREP can also read and write the following formats. These files are treated as document files, even if they are technically archives:

CHM files: HTML Help files consist of compressed HTML files and other files.

Formats That PowerGREP Can Decompress Only

PowerGREP can search through files stored in these archive formats, but it cannot save modified files back into the archive. PowerGREP does provide extensive options for saving the modified files elsewhere, compressed using one of the above formats, or not.

"I can’t tell you how often this program comes in as a lifesaver when researching data issues for me… just today I needed to sift thru 150 zipped files with roughly 10,000 files inside, and PowerGrep not only handled it, but faster than any of us imagined possible."

— Howard Maher 28 March 2011, Texas, USA

"I just want to tell you that you have a great program there. It turned a job that could have taken hours into a few minutes. The Microsoft OneCare back up system creates ZIP files, hundreds of them. We use an external hard drive and OneCare backs up the files over our network. My daughter is a college student and her computer died. She needed all her notes for one of the topics for a final exam and by using PowerGREP we were able to search the backup drive and get her files immediately to load on another computer for her to continue her intensive studies.